Demonic Night Vision Goggles

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One of the last things I thought of when I walked into the recruiting office was how much the military likes to do things at night.

Somehow we were always waking up very early and staying up very late.

I never bothered to look up what the word reveille meant, but it must be a French word for wake up, it's still pitch black outside.

But walking around in the dark, you tend to bump into things.

So at least when the jungle wasn't too thick, we always wore our nods, or NBGs, night vision goggles.

I remember the first time I got to use night vision goggles.

It was exciting, but it took some getting used to.

Everything is green, and the image you're seeing is sort of grainy.

It's not super clear.

We usually only wore one optic over our non-shooting eye.

and left the other eye open.

And if the moon is out, you can usually see pretty well at night.

Eventually your brain adapts to using a lens and it combines both the green image from one eye and whatever you can see with the other eye if there's good enough illumination.

But after staring through the lens for several hours, I have to say, it is weird.

It's not a normal way to look at the world.

It's not like we were ever supposed to see in the dark like this.

And it is the real world you're looking at, not a badly rendered video game.

but it looks like it.

And so this can play tricks on your brain, and you start start to see things.

And you really can't tell if these are just hallucinations or not.

But the night vision optics we use today are the product of decades of testing and development.

50 years ago, in Vietnam, soldiers were using different types.

And evidently, one of these early experimental models didn't use green light, but red.

And it also incorporated a chemical called dicyanin.

But this chemical had initially been used in experiments to scientifically prove that human beings emit an aura of visible light.

As one Vietnam veteran recounted to his son, the combination of these elements had a terrifying effect on the soldiers who used the experimental goggles.

Evidently, they saw things that human eyes never should have.

This is the story of the demonic night vision goggles

i'm luke la mana

and this is wartime stories

friends welcome

tonight we gather in this special moment to reach across the veil and open a door into the unseen.

The spirits walk among us, waiting for their time to speak.

I ask each of you to join me in silence, allowing your thoughts to calm and your hearts to focus fully on the energy in this room.

Stillness, please.

Let the voices of the living fade so that the spirit of Charles may reveal himself.

He is near.

Charles, if you are with us, we are ready to listen.

Speak to us in your way, through the knock or the whisper, and let us carry your voice forward into the light.

Around the middle of the 19th century, the Western world was was in the midst of what was called the spiritualist movement.

Spiritualism, which was basically a social religious movement, is widely believed to have started in the small town of Hydesville, New York in 1848, specifically when two young women, Maggie Fox and Kate Fox, made an astonishing claim.

According to the Fox sisters, their house was home to the spirit of a man who had been murdered on the property some time ago.

How did they know this?

Well, because they had been directly communicating with him.

The house was believed to be haunted when they first moved in.

At least, that's what the neighbors told them.

But when the sisters began hearing strange bumps and knocking sounds, the rumors seemed to be quite true.

Kate Fox invited the spirit to replicate her finger snaps and was successful in developing a system of communication.

When they started asking the spirit questions, they discovered it was a 31-year-old peddler named Charles B.

Rosna who told them he had been murdered for his money and buried under the house.

Naturally, these bizarre claims were met with skepticism, but when some of the neighbors also confirmed hearing the rapping sounds, the story gained traction.

Neighbors reportedly uncovered fragments of hair and bones during excavations under the house, though later investigations described these findings as inconclusive and possibly hoaxed.

In any case, the whole thing garnered a lot of interest throughout North America and Western Europe.

By the time they were both 18, the Fox sisters had gained fame as mediums and began touring and giving spiritualist performances, which were captivating to their audiences.

The older sister Leah helped manage their careers.

Maggie later confessed in 1888 that they had made up the whole thing, and the rapping noises everyone was hearing was their knuckles cracking.

But her confession didn't stop the growing fascination with spiritualism.

The possibility that we could communicate with the dead wasn't even a new idea, but in the second half of the 19th century, it had quickly become a fashionable pastime.

Even Queen Victoria was holding regular seances in Buckingham Palace to speak with her late husband, Prince Albert.

Fast forward about 50 years, just after the turn of the century, The macabre social trend of speaking to the dead was still going strong.

The Western world was hooked on all things spiritualism.

Millions of people, to varying degrees of success, attempted to commune with the dead using tarot cards, Ouija boards, crystal balls, and everything in between.

There might have once been a time where everyone in the world believed in spirits, but as science advanced, it gave people confidence in the idea that everything had a practical explanation, and maybe the idea of spirits was just an outdated myth.

The many scientific and academics at the time certainly hoped to prove as much.

They considered all these claims about spirit communication as deliberate hoaxes or tricks of the subconscious mind.

So while spiritualism was roaring in popularity, these scientists' efforts to debunk these beliefs became some of the first known scientific investigations into the supernatural.

So while the spiritualist movement is considered the birth of spiritualism, it is also credited with the birth of paranormal investigation.

As much as men of science were trying to prove that spirits didn't exist, there were just as many believers hoping to use science to prove that they did.

Things like vintage cameras, dowsing rods, and pendulums were the more basic kinds of tools.

Some ghost hunters used chemistry kits to test for ectoplasm.

But there were also electronic devices, many of which were intended to measure things that human eyes can't see, namely disturbances in the electromagnetic field.

EMF meters, galvanometers, dictaphones, and sound amplifiers.

But that was just it.

With the exception of cameras, which took time to develop the photos, all of the devices being used were more for the ears than they were for the eyes.

A man named Walter John Kilner would soon change this.

He wanted to create a device that could visualize something that most people didn't even believe existed.

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On most mornings towards the end of the 19th century, Walter would be found heading towards St.

Thomas's Hospital in London, where he worked as the head of electrotherapy.

During his time working at St.

Thomas's from 1879 to 1893, Kilner's electrotherapeutic treatments were the cutting edge of medicine.

His numerous research papers greatly contributed to academic literature.

He became a member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1883, which was a significant milestone in his medical career.

Perhaps because of his medical credentials, Kilner wasn't noted as being a believer in all things supernatural.

Not much is known about his personal religious beliefs either.

But with the ongoing craze of spiritualism happening in the background, Kilner no doubt had an opinion on it.

As one of the hospital's leading medical electricians, he would have at least told anyone that just because something couldn't be seen with the human eye didn't mean it wasn't there.

His profession involved harnessing electrical currents and directing this unseen energy at the human body.

While reading through the works of Dr.

Carl Ludwig von Reichenbach, a renowned chemist, geologist, naturalist, and philosopher, we know that Kilner became fascinated by the possible existence of natural energy fields.

According to Reichenbach's blend of mysticism and science, these energy fields, which he termed the otic force, radiated from every living being, a sort of glowing life force that could be affected by one's emotions and general health.

To most people, these energy fields were invisible.

However, Reichenbach theorized that certain sensitives could perceive this phenomenon through well-trained eyes.

or by manipulating their own otic force through the use of magnets and electrical currents.

Even though Reichenbach's research clearly combined his unfounded personal beliefs in spiritualism with his more grounded research in naturalism, Kilner saw merit in his theories.

By now, modern medicine was well aware of the fact that the human body, along with all living things, was powered by its own electrical current.

Kilner thought it was entirely reasonable to think that this energy could radiate out from a person, as Reichenbach's theory suggested.

Kilner ultimately became convinced that the otic Otic force could be proven to be a physical, observable manifestation of electromagnetic energy surrounding the human body, but he explicitly differentiated his work from spiritualist practices.

This energy was a scientific phenomenon, not a spiritual one.

If only he could find a way to somehow make these energy fields visible to the human eye, Kilner wondered what new things they might be able to learn about the human body.

Possibly it might even help doctors in diagnosing or better understanding certain illnesses and diseases.

Spurred on by the hope of a major scientific discovery, towards the end of his tenure at St.

Thomas's Hospital, Kilner began researching how to visualize what he later called the human atmosphere.

Kilner's early approach to experimenting with the human energy field was to use Reichenbach's suggested method of magnets and electrical currents.

When these failed to yield measurable results, Kilner started to shift his approach.

And finally, he found something that worked.

Through trial and error, he developed a specialized apparatus he called Kilner screens.

These screens were comprised of glass slides treated with various chemicals and colored dyes that filtered out specific wavelengths of light.

The idea was that if the right combination of filters was used, the human aura could finally be observed through these pieces of glass.

A breakthrough was made when when one of these slides was treated with a dye known as discyanin.

The dye is a derivative of coal tar.

When applied to a screen, dicyanin has an interesting effect on light.

It amplifies certain elements of the color spectrum that are otherwise invisible to the human eye.

At the time of Kilner's experiments, the dye was commonly applied to photographic plates to sensitize them to infrared light, with other chemicals like ammonia being added to dilute it and change the sensitivity.

Real-world applications included everything from analytical chemistry in detecting certain fluorescent substances to its more documented use in astronomy, since infrared photos now give researchers much brighter images of the night sky.

Kilner is one of the few known scientists who used dicyanin for medical studies, and looking through the glass slides, now tinted dark blue by the dicyanin, the results were remarkable.

While the dye reduced the human form to a featureless black outline, the blue screen clearly showed a glowing emanation that appeared to radiate several inches from the test subject's body.

This, Kilner was certain, was the otic force that Reichenbach had spoken of, the natural energy field, or aura, as Kilner named it, that surrounded all living things.

After coating some lenses with dicyanin and crafting a pair of wearable goggles, Kilner began to closely study these emanations.

His many findings would form the basis of his published work, The Human Atmosphere, or The Aura Made Visible by the Aid of Chemical Screens, which was published in 1911.

In it, Kilner describes the aura, breaking it down into three distinct layers, the inner aura, outer aura, and the etheric double.

With the aura being invisible to the naked eye, he determined that was because it fell within the ultraviolet spectrum of light.

On a scientific note, it's long been known that light exists as wave energy on the same spectrum as all electromagnetic energy, from very short gamma rays, aka radiation, on one end of the spectrum to the longer frequencies we use to transmit the music and broadcasts we hear on our FM radios.

These are all measured by the respective wavelengths.

Visible light falls on the spectrum just after microwaves and infrared, and is then followed by ultraviolet and X-rays.

Again, Kilner believed the light produced by the human aura fell within the ultraviolet spectrum, so it's just a few wavelengths above what our eyes can physically detect.

Some animals can see ultraviolet light though, including birds, insects, and certain mammals, quite possibly including our dogs and cats.

So if we do have an aura, or more eerily, if spirits have an aura, our pets might be able to see them when we can't.

According to Kilner's research, after testing multiple subjects, he noted that these human emanations he observed were all unique to the respective individual, the aura radiance either dimming or expanding when influenced by emotions or changes to the patient's health.

However, one notable thing that Kilner warned us about is that the goggles he used to study these emanations were quite dangerous.

Due to the toxic nature of the dicyanin dye, Kilner eventually discovered that that long-term exposure to the chemical often resulted in intense eye pain, headaches, and even permanent vision loss.

Because of this, Kilner advised that this eyewear should only be used as a way to gradually train the wearer's eyes with the intention of the person eventually being able to see the energy fields without using the goggles.

Following its release in 1911, Kilner's research generated a fair amount of publicity and interest, especially among the more spiritually-minded readers.

But it didn't take long for skeptics to start poking holes in his claims when other researchers attempted to replicate his experiments.

Kilner's theories were fairly grounded, but the evidence he presented was largely anecdotal, entirely based on his own observations, which apparently could not be recreated easily.

Many dismissed his findings as artifacts of optical illusions or physiological effects.

A 1912 review in the British Medical Journal remarked that Kilner failed to provide convincing evidence of the aura's existence as, quote, a purely physical phenomenon.

Despite Kilner's sincere efforts at scientific discovery, the human atmosphere was widely regarded as pseudoscience.

Unfortunately, if there was any hope of defending his research, either because of his advanced age or declining health, Kilner never had the opportunity to do so.

Just nine years after publishing his work, Walter John Kilner would pass away at the age of 73.

Kilner's lack of engagement with critics and his failure to defend or clarify his findings led to the scientific community viewing his work with suspicion and skepticism.

As such, his posthumous reputation largely faded over time, but apparently certain aspects of Kilner's research would live on, though likely not in the way he was expecting or hoping for.

Specifically, there is a very strange and honestly terrifying story that is said to have taken place during the Vietnam War.

Some of the greatest advancements in technology have happened because of wars, everything from wristwatches to GPS and the internet.

In the 1960s, the government was evidently investing into the creation of wearable optics that would allow their soldiers to see in the dark, something the guys fighting in Vietnam really could have used.

The problem was, the army was evidently using Walter Kilner's research.

And if the Dicyanin-tinted lenses of his goggles could allow people to perceive the invisible human aura, what else would they see?

Given the nature of the fighting in Vietnam, the ability to operate in total darkness would be critical to American success.

The North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong guerrillas tended to lay low during the daylight hours.

Most of their movements of troops, supplies, and their ambushes were carried out under the cover of darkness.

The primary reason for this was that the Americans had command of the air.

Any attack made during the day would be met with waves of helicopters, aerial bombardments, and other gunships.

But the pilots couldn't see very well at night, so once the sun went down, the Americans' remote outposts and fire bases immediately became vulnerable to coordinated attacks.

Having arrived in Vietnam in the spring of 1965, it didn't take long for the American soldiers to realize that the Vietnamese owned the night.

And even during the daytime, despite their superior airpower, the Vietnamese often had the cover of jungle and entrenchments.

Plenty of helicopters went out to drop off troops and supplies and medevac the wounded, and never made it back, shot to hell by overwhelming enemy ground fire.

So, American pilots were still flying at night.

The cover of darkness worked both ways, and in spite of the obvious risks, they just required a large amount of training, experience, and reliance on their flight instruments.

Pilots within a flight hours would eventually develop a sense of spatial awareness and otherwise flew at higher altitudes and used radar to map the ground below them.

But overall, if they could see, it would make the war a lot easier.

Night vision wasn't a new idea.

In fact, infrared optics were first seen during World War II, such as the FG-1250 systems mounted on the German panzer tanks, and American snipers were using smaller rifle-mounted devices.

The problem with these and everything used up until 1964 was that they all required an infrared spotlight to first illuminate their targets.

In 1964, the American military had finally started developing the ANPBS-2, or starlight scope.

This was the first passive night vision optic, meaning it only needed the ambient light from the stars or the moon to work.

A huge leap forward.

But even then, the starlight scope wasn't ready for use until 1967, two years into the war, and wasn't fully adopted until 1969.

And it was too bulky and offered a limited range of vision, being fixed at four times magnification, making it completely unusable for the situational awareness required while flying an aircraft.

It was great for slow-moving targets on the ground, and that's about it.

So around this time, the Army was evidently working frantically to come up with some kind of night vision optic that could be worn by pilots, like a pair of goggles.

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All right, boys, time to play play with the new gear.

Gunners, you ready to switch those things on?

Yes, sir.

Yes, sir.

Alright, go ahead and switch one.

Let me know what you're seeing.

Oh, wow.

This is crazy.

What is it?

What

everything's just

red, sir?

Yeah, they did mention that in the briefing.

Uh, maybe it's easier on the eyes.

How does everything look?

How's the clarity?

You uh you think you'd be able to target anything with them?

Uh

yes, sir.

Uh with tracers, this would be a cinch

the depth perception is a bit weird.

Even at this altitude, it's it's hard to distinguish

to the other scopes.

Holy mother of

it!

What the hell are you shooting at?

This story was shared by Cliff Hai, the son of a soldier who had served in Vietnam.

He wasn't a conventional ground soldier.

Having enlisted in the army during the 1950s, Cliff said that his father received a battlefield commission to officer during the Korean War.

Now in Vietnam, he would have been a field officer, possibly a colonel, overseeing one of the operational units in country.

Specifically, although the unit name is not known, during his three tours in Vietnam, he was in charge of overseeing a number of technological projects.

It was during one of these tours that his father's unit was tasked with a very unique experiment, the testing of a small batch of prototype night vision goggles that were issued to a select group of helicopter flight crews.

As opposed to the contemporary version of night vision goggles, which use a green light, these optics being tested in Vietnam were filtered through the red color spectrum.

Since red doesn't tire out the night vision capabilities of the human eyes, it's possible that this was thought to be a more tactical spectrum to use.

Human eyes detect more shades of green than red, making the red color spectrum less dynamic, but the clarity was evidently decent.

According to Cliff, the optics also had a secondary filter that flipped to a yellow spectrum for detecting heat signatures.

There was only one problem.

Possibly hoping to enhance them in some way, as the story is often told, these experimental night vision goggles had been treated with Walter Kilner's Dicyanin solution, and the results were terrifying.

Cliff's father said everything went to hell the very first night they tried using these new optics.

His father was accompanying a small squadron of helicopters on a test flight.

Each of the gunners had been given a set of the red optics.

While flying over a peaceful area of the South Vietnamese countryside, the gunner on the right side of his helicopter suddenly opened fire, but not towards the ground.

He was firing wildly off to the side of the aircraft.

While the helicopters flying alongside them suddenly broke formation to avoid being hit by the 50-caliber gunfire, Cliff's father was screaming at the gunner to stop.

wondering what the hell he was shooting at.

Other units had experienced issues with their guys using heroin, and this certainly seemed like the case.

Bolting out of the co-pilot seat, Cliff's father went to grab the soldier sitting behind him and pull him off the gun.

Getting close enough to see him and pulling the goggles off his face, he saw that his eyes were wide, clearly terrified, and he asked him what he was shooting at.

The answer he got back was certainly not what he expected.

Over the noise of the aircraft, the gunner described what he saw.

There was really really only one word for it.

Demons.

Demons flying alongside their helicopter.

And the reason he shot them was because they were coming to get him.

They were gesturing and pointing at him, clearly able to see him as much as he could see them.

So he opened fire.

Cliff never mentioned what his father said after that, but it seems obvious that Hearing this man's response about what he was seeing through the goggles would not have alleviated any concerns he had about the guy being a heroin addict.

But Cliff did say his father knew he wasn't exhibiting any of the usual symptoms of a drug user.

It must have been a rather awkward flight back to base after that, as well as the debrief that took place once they landed and the other pilots were asking, why the hell were you shooting at us?

But that gunner would not be the last guy to see something akin to monsters or demons through the red lenses.

Over the following weeks, whenever the crews were sent out to test the optics, again and again, more reports were being made about the men being scared out of their wits by what they saw through the goggles.

Because Cliff is telling the story secondhand, it's hard to say why the program wasn't canceled immediately, or whether the initial reports were even being taken seriously, or if these creatures were actually visible to everyone who used the goggles.

It's possible that the higher ranks simply thought that everyone was on drugs, or they thought that the lenses simply had hallucinogenic side effects.

But as the unit morale began to decline, with the psychological effects of wearing the goggles becoming increasingly apparent, officers and pilots were apparently told not to wear the goggles to avoid suffering these side effects.

But Cliff's father eventually just grabbed a pair, wanting to know what they were doing to his guys.

And the experience haunted him ever since.

Cliff's father put the goggles on and saw that, with everything being red, it already looked like some kind of gothic, hellish landscape.

But as he then peered around the area near their camp, he saw what appeared to be winged creatures with claws leaping down from the surrounding treetops.

Now terrified himself, he pulled off the goggles and was staring at the treetops, and there was nothing there, just the fog drifting over the tops of the trees in the quiet night.

This is where Cliff concluded his father's story, having previously stated that his father realized that whatever these red goggles were, they weren't going to be useful.

He effectively kanked the whole disastrous experiment after only 60 days of trials.

Considering the pragmatic nature of military reporting, if these events happened as stated, It's unlikely the upper echelons of the Army ever heard about these incidents from either Cliff's father or any of the other officers hoping to stay in the Army long enough to receive their retirement pension.

Since Cliff High's interview hit the internet in 2018, his claims about the red spectrum night vision goggles tested by his father and his unit have of course drawn their fair share of criticism.

Through years of experimentation, green light ultimately became the ideal color spectrum for night vision.

Between the cones and rods in our eyes, the rods are responsible for night vision and are most sensitive to green light.

That means that in low light conditions, the eyes can discern more shades of green than any other color, providing greater detail and contrast.

Green light was also found to be less fatiguing for the eyes compared to other colors, such as red or blue.

This is particularly important for prolonged use of night vision devices, as it helps to minimize eye strain and discomfort.

But it's not as if this debunks Cliff's story.

He himself calmly stated that his father said the red spectrum was experimental and that the technology ultimately went to green.

But it does seem that he suggested the military switched to green because of this incident.

All available records do seem to indicate that green light was the initial color chosen for the first generation of passive night vision goggles introduced during the Vietnam War in the 1960s.

But then again, if the red lenses caused terrifying hallucinations or literally allowed men to see into another dimension, it's not like this would have been publicized.

And maybe the men who experienced it largely refrained from speaking about it, as is the case with many strange experiences and encounters by military personnel who are hoping to maintain a reputation of sanity.

Following the release of Cliff's story, there have been other Vietnam veterans, many of them helicopter crew members, who voiced their opinions about the story, saying they never encountered red night vision goggles and that helmet-mounted optics were incredibly rare at the time.

Then, there's the reported use of Dicyanin dye that, according to some versions of this story, was responsible for the goggles' distinctive red tint and supernatural qualities.

But I listened to Cliff's interview.

and he never once mentioned Walter Kilner or Dicyanin.

As with other bizarre bizarre stories, the story of the demonic night vision goggles seems to have been changed over the last few years of retellings.

Since Cliff never mentioned Dicyanin when recounting his father's story, it initially seemed that someone had intentionally or unintentionally combined the Walter Kilner story with this one, maybe to offer an explanation for why these goggles could see demons.

But some of the information just didn't add up, for instance with Kilner's goggles being a dark shade of blue, not red.

Strangely enough, though, there might actually be a lot of documented truth behind Cliff's story about demonic night vision goggles.

After some research, I stumbled across a very interesting document that seems to answer the question of where this story got mixed up.

It's a research article published by the Department of History at the United States Naval Academy in 2017.

It's titled The Secret of Seeing Charlie in the Dark, written by Richard A.

Ruth.

The subtitle is The Starlight Scope, Techno-Anxiety and the Spectral Mediation of the Enemy in the Vietnam War.

As mentioned earlier, the Starlight Scope was the rifle-mounted optic that was used in Vietnam from 1967 and onward.

And again, it was the first passive optic used by the American military, meaning you didn't need an infrared spotlight to create light for the scope.

but just enough ambient starlight or moonlight.

The article is over 60 pages, but in short, the introduction of the starlight scope to soldiers fighting in a war was highly problematic.

While the article does talk about the tactical advantage the scope gave soldiers, it primarily addresses how the scope imposed, quote, psychological and physical burdens on the users, creating anxiety and moral dilemmas.

So what was the problem?

Well, the overarching point is that these guys weren't used to being able to see at night, and now the scopes made it very easy to see in the dark.

But everything was green, and the optic gave everything an eerie, ethereal look to it.

It would have been the most unusual thing these guys had ever seen.

While functionally useful, these guys were already run ragged by the war, and now they spent night after night, exhausted, staring at a green landscape that looked like another dimension and trying to kill anything that looked like an enemy soldier in that dimension.

When I was in the Marines, as part of a training course I did, I once spent about three days locked in solitary confinement.

They put each of us in a dark room about four feet by two and a half feet.

It was more like a box, with nothing but a piece of wood to sit on and a bucket in the corner to pee in.

And we had to ask permission to use the bucket.

It was very degrading.

The only light coming in was through a small crack under the door, and they didn't let us sleep.

Oh, I fell asleep, but they checked on us every few minutes, and trust me, you didn't want to let them catch you sleeping.

They had a little peephole in the door where they would check.

After about a day, I lost track of time, and then I started hallucinating.

This was training, and they told me beforehand that this would happen, and I realized they were not lying.

The combination of being exhausted and having nothing to look at, it's like my brain was trying to stimulate itself by creating images.

But I knew I was just imagining things.

I watched a tree growing in a grassy field, and then a girl with a wicker basket.

in a dress running across the field and then the tree morphed into an old man smoking a pipe, things like that.

I have also seen weird things through my own NVGs, especially when I was already tired from multiple sleepless days during reconnaissance training or long patrols.

I spent a couple of minutes talking to a guy that wasn't even there when I was patrolling once.

He was perfectly visible through my NVGs, but then I took it off.

and he was gone.

I've read stories about guys who also saw people in their NVGs MVGs that weren't there when they took them off.

Apparently, the effect was pretty much the same in Vietnam with the starlight scopes.

In other intimate mythologies of the war, the eerie green landscape generated by the starlight scope was populated by ambiguous entities.

Fatigue, stress, and fear exacerbated the tendency in some soldiers to misinterpret the images they saw through the scope.

scope.

What sometimes appeared to be a gorilla turned out to be a rat, a monkey, or some other jungle creature.

Poisonous snakes magnified to unsettling closeness slithered amidst the phosphorescent flashes of light, like mythological beasts upon a nightmare landscape.

Even inanimate objects such as rocks and plants appeared to be enemy soldiers advancing forward on the viewer.

Soldiers described dragons and other supernatural creatures appearing from within the writhing phosphorescent murk of a starlight scope landscape.

One former medic recalled using a starlight scope to monitor hundreds of dead enemy bodies after a particularly intense firefight, only to discover in the morning that the corpses were a hallucination.

Another soldier likened the explosion of moving light dots to a landscape that seemed to always be snowing.

R.L.

Shredley, who as a U.S.

Navy commander served as a staff historian for Commander Naval Forces Vietnam under Vice Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr.

in 1969, described just such an illusion while observing sailors doing reconnaissance aboard a river patrol boat.

You take your turn on the starlight scope, Shreedley writes, and viewed in its eerie green glow, everything on the bank seems to move.

Bushes become animate.

The device transforms a nightscape into something akin to an LSD hallucination.

In a telling anecdote included in his celebrated wartime study dispatches, the journalist Michael Hare describes a long-range reconnaissance patrol soldier who took drugs by the fistful so that the jungle at night would appear to him as if viewed through a starlight scope.

In combination with reading this article, I watched an interview with a Vietnam veteran where he recounted how his platoon commander had given him something called stay-awake pills to keep him from falling asleep at night.

He said they really worked.

He would spend days awake taking these pills.

When he was sent back to the U.S., he threw the remaining pills in his bag.

thinking he might have some use for them.

And everyone going back to the U.S.

was of course being screened for contraband.

So, when he passed his luggage through, a lieutenant found the pill bottle and asked him where the hell he got it.

He told him the truth and said that these were issued to me, and that his platoon commander had called them stay-awake pills.

The lieutenant doing the screening then looked over at another officer nearby, his eyes now wide, and then back at this guy, and he told him, Sergeant, this is speed.

I'm not sure if that guy's story was applicable to most Vietnam veterans, but suffice it to say that the starlight scope and any night optic would be an absolute trip while taking methamphetamines and being sleep deprived.

So while the jury is still out on whether the Army ever introduced red-spectrum night vision optics and whether those optics were laced with a chemical used by Walter Kilner to perceive the human aura, it is 100% true that the soldiers in Vietnam were seeing terrifying monsters in their night vision optics.

And it is also 100% true that the use of those optics caused psychological and physiological problems, like what Cliff High described in his father's story about the units he supervised using the experimental optics and then having mental breakdowns, which led his father to tell them to stop wearing the optics altogether.

Following Cliff's interview interview being aired in 2018, it does seem like these three stories were mistakenly combined into one.

Walter Kilner's experiments with dicyanin from the early 20th century, the 2017 research article on the starlight scope, and Cliff High's story about his dad and the red spectrum optics.

Since Cliff's father's story about red spectrum night vision is a bit more bizarre, I can imagine that over time it became what most stories do.

A summarized version of events.

What he could remember, with maybe some of the more exciting parts being embellished for a dramatic effect.

Clearly, it took only a few years for the internet to do the same thing with this story after Cliff told it.

But oddly enough, the original story really wasn't that far off from what many Vietnam veterans actually experienced while looking through their green spectrum night vision scopes.

And for those of us who believe in dimensions beyond our own, and in in demons, even if we haven't seen them with our physical eyes, we know they exist anyway.

But whether the soldiers in Vietnam were just hallucinating or whether those optics did, in a way, allow them to see into another dimension,

I have said it before, and I will say it again now.

They saw it.

They were terrified by it.

And for some, it left them with an experience and a memory that haunted them for the rest of their life.

Whatever we think 50 years on, for those men, the demons they saw coming after them

were real.

Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke Lamana.

Executive produced by Mr.

Bollin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt.

Written by Jake Howard and myself.

Audio editing and sound design by me, Luke Lamana, and Alex Carpenter.

Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stidham.

Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan.

Mixed and mastered by Brendan Kane.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone.

Production coordination by Avery Siegel.

Additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden.

Artwork by Jessica Kloxen Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picada.

If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartimestories.com.

Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.